Prayer

Petitionary prayer seems to presuppose that asking changes something. But if God is omniscient, God already knows what would be best; and if God is provident, God has already determined (on many theological views) what will occur. This raises the question of whether prayer is anything more than a psychologically comforting but causally inert practice.

Philosopher Richard Swinburne offers an influential response: God may have freely chosen to make certain goods contingent on prayer, treating it as a genuine secondary cause much like human effort or medical treatment, which remain meaningful means within providence even though God foreknows and ordains their outcomes.

Jesus' teaching that 'your Father knows what you need before you ask him' (Matthew 6:8) rules out one model of prayer — informing God of facts God doesn't already know — but does not rule out prayer's relational and volitional functions: expressing trust, cultivating dependence, and aligning one's own desires with a larger purpose.

On this view, prayer is less like submitting a request to an uninformed administrator and more like a child's expressed dependence on a parent who already intends good things but has structured the relationship around genuine asking and giving.

Scripture does not promise that every sincere request will be granted as asked. James attributes some unanswered prayer to wrong motives (James 4:3). Paul's own repeated request for relief from an unspecified 'thorn in the flesh' is denied, with an explicit theological reason given: God's grace is sufficient, and the weakness serves a larger purpose (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).

Jesus himself, in Gethsemane, models the pattern most fully: a specific, urgent, and entirely legitimate request ('let this cup pass from me') submitted to a larger will ('not my will but yours be done'). This suggests submission to potential denial is not a failure of prayer but part of its intended shape.

Empirical researchers have attempted to test intercessory prayer's efficacy directly, most notably in the large-scale STEP study (2006), a randomized trial involving cardiac surgery patients that found no benefit from intercessory prayer, and a slightly higher complication rate among patients informed they were being prayed for, possibly due to performance anxiety.

Such results neither straightforwardly confirm nor refute theistic claims about prayer. Many theologians argue a personal, freely responding God, acting within a larger providential purpose, is not obviously the kind of variable a double-blind controlled trial is designed to isolate — a serious methodological limitation on both sides of the debate, not a convenient dodge invented only when results are unfavorable.

Taken together, the philosophical and biblical material suggests prayer can be coherent and meaningful without guaranteeing that every specific request will be granted. The difficulty of unanswered prayer remains genuinely painful and not fully resolved by any of these explanations individually.

A mature theology of prayer holds together confidence that prayer matters, honesty that denial is a real and biblically acknowledged possibility, and humility that the specific reasons for any particular unanswered prayer may remain hidden this side of full understanding.